In a wireless Local Area Network (LAN), a wireless LAN terminal communicates with another device via an access point, which is a wireless base station provided with a wireless repeating function.
To manage the communication quality of the wireless LAN, packets passing through a wired section of the wireless LAN may be captured and then the communication state of the wireless LAN may be analyzed.
For example, one of techniques for managing the communication quality of a wireless LAN is to monitor the operating states of wireless terminals at ports of a switching hub, according to the device identification information of the wireless terminals.
In addition, for example, there is another technique in which a plurality of wireless base stations each notify a management apparatus of the load information of the own base station, and the management apparatus compares the received load information to select a wireless base station for a connection.
Please see, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication Nos. 2010-63000 and 2009-141535.
By capturing packets in a wired section of a wireless LAN and analyzing the communication of the wireless LAN, as described above, the quality of communication between a wireless LAN terminal and a server may be confirmed.
However, packets traveling through the wired section do not carry information about access points to which the wireless LAN terminals having transmitted the packets are connected. Therefore, such conventional techniques are not able to analyze the communication quality taking the connected access points into consideration.
For example, assume that an access point has caused deterioration in the communication quality of all wireless LAN terminals connected to the access point. The conventional techniques of analyzing packets traveling through a wired section are able to detect the deterioration of the communication quality occurring in the wireless LAN terminals, but are unable to determine whether these wireless LAN terminals are connected to the same access point. Therefore, it would take time to detect that the access point is the cause of the deterioration of the communication quality.
If it is determined that the wireless LAN terminals with the deteriorated communication quality are connected to the same access point, it could be expected that the wireless LAN terminals would not be the cause of the deterioration. This eliminates the need of inspecting the wireless LAN terminals to identify the cause of the deterioration. Thus, it is possible to investigate the cause efficiently.